Reviews: Pangborn, Edgar

Edgar Pangborn
Tales of a Darkening World

This demonstrates a pitfall the preferred length of modern SF generally
skirts. I began intended just to reread Edgar Pangborn’s post-holocaust
Bildungsroman
Davy but because I was also planning to reread
Canticle for Leibowitz, which covers centuries to Davy’s
decades I then began to ponder if it would be better to reread all the
stories Pangborn wrote in that setting so I would be comparing similar
spans of time or at least half a millennium to 1800 years. After all, both
The Company of Glory and The Judgment of Eve are short
and the collection
Still I Persist in Wondering is under 300
pages. Of course, it all added up to something as long as
The Past
Through Tomorrow
or Adventures in Time and Space. I am sure
there is a lesson here somewhere and equally sure that I didn’t learn it.

Although he is comparatively obscure now, in the 1950s Pangborn won an
International Fantasy Award for his
A Mirror for Observers, a Hugo
nomination for
Davy (which lost to Leiber’s execrable The
Wanderer
; what the hell, SF fandom?), and Nebula nominations for “A
Better Mousehole” and “Mount Charity”. A fair fraction of his work was set
the Darkening World, in a world where thanks to resource depletion,
overpopulation, light nuclear war, and a host of almost certainly
engineered plagues, civilization collapsed, leaving in its wake a small and
infertile population of people to survive as best they can.